When I heard a news story about Donald Trump’s hotline to report crimes committed by illegal aliens, my first thought was of The X-Files, or perhaps those aliens in Independence Day who blew up the White House. Of course there are serious objections to the xenophobic and racist nature of this program, and others have tried to tie up the hotline by protested along the lines I was first thinking of.

BuzzFeed reports that People Are Trolling Trump’s New Anti-Immigrant Hotline With Reports Of Space Aliens And The Government Is Not Amused. By coincidence, Wednesday was also Alien Day, used to promote the upcoming release of Alien: Covenant, further putting people in the mood for this type of protest. There was encouragement on Twitter:

Alexander McCoy, a member of the activist group Common Defense, called to say he was abducted by a UFO, and the person taking his call did not get the joke. Once they did figure out what was going on, Immigration officials were not amused:

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told BuzzFeed News the hotlines were “tied up by hoax callers.”

“There are certainly more constructive ways to make one’s opinions heard than to prevent legitimate victims of crime from receiving the information and resources they seek because the lines are tied up by hoax callers,” an ICE spokesperson said.

“We will adjust resources, if necessary, to ensure that the victims for whom this office and hotline is intended get the info and resources they need.”

There were also calls to complain that Superman is an illegal alien, and warnings about that orange alien from New York.

Gabe Ortiz had more serious criticism of the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) program:

Here’s the truth: “unauthorized immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the American population at large,” according to multiple studies. And the pro-immigrant sanctuary city policies that Trump loves to hate actually make communities safer, because local law enforcement agencies are able to build trust with immigrant residents. But truth isn’t Trump’s intention here. As the Atlantic notes, if “Trump’s goal is stigmatizing a vulnerable class of people, then publicizing their crimes—and their crimes alone—makes sense. It’s been a tactic bigots have used more than a century”:

In The Nazi Conscience, Duke historian Claudia Koonz notes that the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer ran a feature called “Letter Box,” which published readers’ accounts of Jewish crimes. When the Nazis took power, the German state began doing something similar. Frustrated by the failure of most Germans to participate in a boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933, Adolf Hitler’s government began publicizing Jewish crime statistics as a way of stoking anti-Semitism. In Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, the historian Saul Friedlander notes that, until 1938, Hitler’s Ministry of Justice ordered prosecutors to forward every criminal indictment against a Jew so the ministry’s press office could publicize it.

In response to the obvious fearmongering about immigrants from the Trump administration, Reps. Jared Polis (D-Colorado), Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), and Tony Cárdenas (D-California) launched the Saved by American Immigrants National Task force (SAINT) program, which aims to highlight stories of Americans who were saved by the heroic acts of immigrants.